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Comment Re:"Programmer" vs "AI" (Score 5, Informative) 174

I'm a AAA graphics programmer, I'm at the top of my game, 15 years experience on some big titles, a graphics engine that ships billions of dollars of games. When you use it properly, GPT absolutely rocks at programming for real world huge scale problems. You can quote me: it's insane to lowball GPT's ability. GPT knows intricate details about how to handle complex high performance code.

If you are not prepared and it gives you a hallucination, or you try to let it lead, then yes, it can't code. One example - it can write itself in a corner where it needs a function that doesn't exist. Next time you query - just tell it that it is having a problem because it keeps trying to use the same non-existant function. Problem solved.

Yes, it's scope is limited - can't handle more than about 200 lines of code at once. I just break up my ideas into pseudocode, capture the dependencies, and write them into the prompts to generate the functions.

Yes it makes simple mistakes. I just correct it and move on.

If you work through the problem with GPT methodically, it will solve it, absolutely, with enough retries, 95% of the time.

This is an absolutely insane productivity boost for me, I'd estimate 5x or more.

Comment That's not how the halting problem works (Score 1) 194

"Any program written to stop AI harming humans and destroying the world, for example, may reach a conclusion (and halt) or not -- it's mathematically impossible for us to be absolutely sure either way, which means it's not containable."

This is mumbo jumbo.

Conceptually, you need a sensor that detects human in harm's way. Then the AI should be disabled from acting when that sensor is true.

If you want something more than that, fine - but don't act like it can't be done. You're the human, there's nothing you "can't" make it do.

Comment I dunno Linus... (Score 4, Insightful) 218

I wouldn't personally spend money on ECC RAM. I've worked on many dozens of computers and hundreds of code bases as a programmer and I have never pinpointed RAM corruption as a noteworthy failure point. There are a lot of things to worry about in life, like failing hard drives. RAM corruption at most requires a reboot.

Comment AAA Game Dev response (Score 1) 63

AAA Game programmer here. I'm disappointed to see so many dismissive and rude responses.

I would estimate the speedup as at least 100x (just an educated ballpark). I choose this number because, the speedup for a single shader would be well over 1000x, but games don't use just one shader.

Game engines use different shader programs, from dozens to thousands, in order to draw different techniques. The first constraint would be that you'd need to choose which shaders you want. Shaders are often *a little bit* generic, in that, many, many of them are doing essentially the same things but slightly differently.

First, you would convert all of your shaders into a generic, branching architecture, an "uber-shader" (this is the actual jargon).

If the artists agreed that you have ensapsulated all novel rendering techniques that they care about, then you could start building an ASIC architecture to replace those shaders.

But development cost would be high and you would not be able to support every game.

Comment Re:What does it do if you remove all gender? (Score 1) 381

Yes, machine learning *is* unpredictable. But the point is that the existing dataset is so dominated by class division, you've gotta predict that there's a reasonable chance the machine will generate a model that reinforces the old class divisions, even if it has to make tenuous links.

Hiring should be *mostly* based on merit, but we also have a chance to improve the future by taking a conscious hand in deviating from the pure numbers. Ie, the human factor.

Comment Re:Why is this shocking? (Score 1) 273

The difference is that events A and B *did* actually have an objective ordering, it was simply that the observer's measurements (which relied on photons reflected off the event) has distortion. But you're partially right about subjectivity of the observer.

The waveform collapse *doesn't care* about whether you're "microscopic" or "macroscopic" or "two different people" but it does care if 2 particles interact and become entangled, in which case, they have to be consistent.

When two physicists, Alice and Bob compare results of the same quantum experiment, *every particle that interacts in their bodies and environments* will collapse its waveform, resulting in one consistent history for the whole room without paradox. The waveform collapse will propagate through every quantum element it interacts with (via light bounces, strong or weak forces, any interaction). The "waveform collapse" just defines which reality for particle A is connected to which reality for particle B if they're going to interact.

Until Alice and Bob affect each other, for each Alice, there's an infinite Bobs (even impossible Bobs), and vice versa. But when any particles from Bob interact with particles from Alice, those particles become entangled, and the waveform collapses (for that particle). The waveform collapse propagates to any other particle affected by the original particle. So all the particles that affect each other are in the same, consistent universe.

Now if Charlie has Alice and Bob in a box, then for Charlie, there are STILL infinite sets of entangled "Alice and Bob" pairs in superposition. Charlie won't know which Alice and Bob he's connected to until *he* measures them.

Also notice, this is the same conclusion the layman can make about subjective reality. A person can't know what's inside a lead-lined box. There's no objective different between saying "I can't know what's in the box until I look" and "All infinite possibilities are in the box, and when I open it, I will find 1 of those realities."

Math

The Peculiar Math That Could Underlie the Laws of Nature (quantamagazine.org) 242

xanthos writes: A fascinating article in Quanta magazine introduces us to Cohl Furey and the eight dimensional mathematics called octonions that she is using to model the interactions of strong and electromagnetic forces.

"Proof surfaced in 1898 that the reals, complex numbers, quaternions and octonions are the only kinds of numbers that can be added, subtracted, multiplied and divided. The first three of these "division algebras" would soon lay the mathematical foundation for 20th-century physics, with real numbers appearing ubiquitously, complex numbers providing the math of quantum mechanics, and quaternions underlying Albert Einstein's special theory of relativity. This has led many researchers to wonder about the last and least-understood division algebra. Might the octonions hold secrets of the universe?"

"In her most recent published paper she consolidated several findings to construct the full Standard Model symmetry group for a single generation of particles, with the math producing the correct array of electric charges and other attributes for an electron, neutrino, three up quarks, three down quarks and their anti-particles. The math also suggests a reason why electric charge is quantized in discrete units -- essentially, because whole numbers are."

Comment A game for the adults, not the junevile (Score 3, Interesting) 196

The fan boys are just that... boys. NMS is for men and women who love the idea of space exploration.

As an adult (35 year-old) AAA developer who has worked on some of the best rated space games of all time... Let me tell you, No Man's Sky is a treasure. It's a game-making achievement. I am a game dev, and I studied NMS deeply. These tools and tricks have existed for only about 15 years and never in the same product before to such a high quality.

There's not very much that hits my quality bar, but I put at least 40 hours in. That means, it's an immense accomplishment for Hello games.

The juvenile can cry all day about 'promises'. It doesn't make a difference. What was delivered is pure gold.

Science

The Mutant All-Female Crayfish, Which Reproduces by Cloning Itself, Is Filling Europe at Alarming Speed (atlasobscura.com) 279

The marbled crayfish looks much like any other freshwater crustacean. It has two claws, ten legs, and an attractive blue-brown marbled shell. Yet this six-inch creature, found in streams and lakes around the world, is far more sinister than you might expect. From a report: Its new scientific name gives a few clues: Procambarus virginalis. Every marbled crayfish, known as a marmorkreb in German, is female -- and they reproduce by cloning themselves. Frank Lyko, a biologist at the German Cancer Research Center, first heard about the marbled crayfish from a hobbyist aquarium owner, who picked up some "Texas crayfish" at a pet shop in 1995. They were strikingly large, and they laid enormous batches of eggs -- hundreds, in a single go. Soon, the New York Times reports, the hobbyist was beset with so many crayfish he was giving them away to his friends. And soon after that, marmorkrebs were showing up in pet stores upon Europe.

There was something very strange about these crayfish. They were all female, and they all laid hundreds of eggs without mating. These eggs, in turn, hatched into hundreds more females -- with each one growing up fully able to reproduce by herself. In 2003, scientists sequenced their DNA and confirmed what many owners already believed to be the case: Each baby crayfish was a clone of its mother, and they were filling Europe's fishtanks at alarming speed. Just 25 years ago, the marbled crayfish did not exist at all. Now, they can be found in the wild by the millions in Germany, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Croatia, the Ukraine, Japan, and Madagascar.

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